Re-assessing the Affair

17

remembering, whereby everything and everyone associated with National Socialism

is seen as an aberration grotesque elements of a demonic singularity, as is so
prevalent in much of what we see and read is not to remember the past at all but to
concoct a myth thereby leaving us blind to the very real possibility of further shocking
episodes of mans capacity for inhumanity.20 In this orgy of self-righteousness we are
not only engaged in an act of wilful forgetfulness, we further run the very real risk of
doing an enormous disservice to the young.21 Perhaps to remember the Holocaust
ultimately will be to remember that it is not the legacy of a handful of evil Germans
brokering a final solution in the 1940s, rather it is the legacy of we good Europeans. It is
a complex, horrific, and not just German, but ultimately human story; the true evil, the
true horror of it, as Hannah Arendt so vividly portrays is the banality of it.22 To believe
that the possibility of similar future events ended with the lives of those who were the
immediate perpetrators misses the very important lesson to be learned! Zimmerman,
for example, argues that: Heidegger glided over the fact that the Holocaust was a
German phenomenon involving the slaughter of millions of Jews. Instead, he chose
to view the Holocaust as a typical episode in the technological era afflicting the entire
West.23 Zimmerman agrees with Lacoue-Labarthe that Heideggers great failing was
his refusal to see Auschwitz or the Holocaust as a caesura. For Zimmerman then,
the challenge is to treat the Holocaust as entirely singular, a dreadful and specifically
German anomaly. It seems clear that even if Heidegger had been keen to explicitly
discuss the Holocaust at length philosophically and to indeed repent publicly for his
own Nazi allegiances or express profound grief for what had happened, which would
have more than satisfied many of his most ardent critics, he would yet eschew this
parsing of the narrative concerning the Holocaust as missing its deepest essence. This
was clearly part of the point he wished to make in his correspondence with Marcuse
as well as in his infamous agriculture remark. Marcuse dismisses the question as
to whether or not it is possible to make comparisons between the Holocaust and
other horrors of the Second World War. Instead Marcuse wants a word, that is, a
public confession from Heidegger concerning his personal feelings on the Holocaust
that would indicate clearly to everyone his revulsion at what took place. And, more
than that, he wants Heidegger to reinforce the discursive rules that had already been
sanctioned concerning the Second World War. When Heidegger responds with a
suggestion to the effect that it is a mistake to look on the Nazi regime in the singular
way demanded by the Allies, Marcuse accuses him essentially of a tu quoque fallacy,24
a criticism levelled against this alleged strategy of Heideggers by subsequent critics
also (that is, of trivializing through comparison).25 And yet, Zimmerman seems at
least partially sensitive to what Heidegger was trying to draw attention to when he
quickly qualifies his own criticism as mentioned above:
in speaking of the Holocaust in the same breath with the hydrogen bomb,
Heidegger was making an important point. Mass extermination in the Nazi
camps was possible only because of developments within industrial technology.
Moreover, the Nazis spoke of the Jews as if they were little more than industrial
waste to be disposed of as efficiently as possible. Officials in charge of planning
strategic use of nuclear weapons must be trained to conceive of the enemy